No Screen Time for Baby

It's all the rage

First things first: Thank you to all anybody who reads, shares, and most of all, pays for a subscription to The Melt. As you know, I’m a working writer, and I’d like to turn this into more of a publication where I’ve got a couple of contributing writers who I can pay for their time and work, so everything helps.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to do a few spin-off sections for The Melt, including one for writing and another about parenting. I realize that not everybody is a writer or a parent, so not everybody wants to read about that stuff, so that will all live under different parts of the Meltiverse. Since I haven’t figured all of that out yet, sorry to anybody who doesn’t like reading my thoughts on being a new-ish parent.

Emily and I have been looking for another family to come on and do a nanny share with us. Lulu and her nanny are best friends, and that’s really the main reason why we’d like to have another baby around during the day: she needs a friend her age, somebody around eight or nine months who wants to split chewing on a Sophie the Giraffe and enjoys quiet strolls around the park with all the abandoned toys. The thing we should have realized about getting involved with another family is it’s a lot like dating or finding a shrink where you might try one out and have a short relationship, but then things quickly sour as we learned first-hand with the family we’d tried to do a share with. They were nice, just not the right fit. We’ve essentially gone on dates with other parents to discuss possibly joining our houses, but Emily and I can pretty much tell within seconds when it won’t be a fit. We’re on the Park Slope Parents list, and there’s also the omnipresent spreadsheet Emily is on that connects Brooklyn parents who might be looking for a nanny or share, neither of which have yielded much besides a few hilarious e-mail exchanges we’ve most forgotten about, save for one. It was with a mother who took umbrage with our “no screen time” rule. We figured it was easy enough to understand since our baby isn’t even a year old, but this particular mother seemed only focused on that one little bit, asking questions like “What if I want my baby to FaceTime with my parents? Is that not allowed?” and generally acting like we’re raising our baby in a cave.

Of all the things I’ve learned in the last nine months of parenting, the one thing I’ve been the most surprised by is the no screens thing tends to provoke people in new and surprising ways. There are people like the spreadsheet mother who downright don’t seem to understand it or need clarification, people who cheer you on, and the parents who do the whole Yeah, good luck with that. It’ll last a year and then you’ll be begging them to take the iPad. I’m especially a fan of people in their 30s and 40s who tell me they grew up watching TV, and they’re OK—to which I want to ask if they really believe that, in the year of our lord 2025, any of us can actually describe ourselves as OK.

Poltergeist but make it about smartphones.

But I don’t. Instead, I try to explain to them that we’re not luddites. Her first keyboard won’t be a typewriter, we’re not installing a rotary phone in our house, and, yes, she’s FaceTimed her grandparents before. We’re not trying to shield our kid from the fact that there are screens with moving images on them; a task like that would be impossible in a place like New York City. All we want to be is mindful about it. Maybe we’ll let her watch a movie on a plane ride when she’s a little older and after she’s three, we’ll start talking about what television shows she can watch. Sesame Street is probably first on the list since we’re already familiar with that, and we’ll investigate from there. As for movies, I can’t wait until she’s old enough to sit with me and watch those, but that’s a few years off.

I’ve been thinking about this all weekend because Amil Niazi wrote column at The Cut on banning YouTube in the home. They started out letting their 3-year-old watch videos of construction toys, partially because there was also a 6-month-old baby in the house and it made things a little easier to keep the older kid occupied for even a short time. It started out harmlessly enough:

Over time though, he began watching videos of YouTubers reviewing new toys, his little sister peering over his shoulder, full of quick cuts, loud sounds, and an overwhelming amount of product and waste. Then, despite parental controls and making sure I was always in the room with them when they watched, the algorithm started to push content that was annoying at best (full of kids doing silly pranks) and encouraging bad behavior at worst (with scary and weird images that made the kids uncomfortable). Finally, last summer, after clocking that every time they watched YouTube they were more irritable and anxious, my husband and I decided to ban it completely. I felt like I’d been asleep to how much this app was impacting my kids, and by cutting it off, I was finally waking up.

That part chilled me. Raising a kid is tough, but I’d say we’re at a point in history when being a child is as stressful as being an adult, it’s just kids don’t know how to express that and adults don’t always take them seriously even if they do. Even before Lulu was born I often found myself watching the news and thinking that, about how I don’t know if I’d be able to make it as a child in today’s world. Long before everybody asked if I’d read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, I could feel the anxiety from just looking at kids and teens when I’d see them peel their eyes away from the iPhone or tablet in front of them. I’ve always been anxious as it is, it’s laced throughout my DNA and the environment I grew up in only intensified it; if I had to worry about the algorithm feeding me toxic crap after I looked something seemingly innocent up or about getting bullied on TikTok, then I don’t think I’d have made it to 18.

My hope is that Emily and I will give Lulu a life that is totally different from the one I had as a kid, and if she ends up inheriting some of the more jittery genes passed down through the generations that we’ll be able to work with her and lessen her stress. Until then, the point is to make sure we don’t tack on anything that will make it harder on any of us. I’m trying hard not to focus too much on five, ten, or twenty years down the line and how one little thing I do or don’t will have repercussions for my daughter; but I’m also not going to sacrifice happiness and well-being so my baby will have something to stare mindlessly at for a few minutes.